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ICANN Newsletter | Week ending 25 July 2008

News from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers


Announcements This Week

ALAC Review: Final Report by Independent Evaluator Released

25 July 2008 | ICANN has posted the summary and final report of the Independent Review of the ALAC submitted by Westlake Consulting. ICANN is seeking public comment on the report.

Domain Name Security Paper Released

24 July 2008 | ICANN's strategic and operating plans call for ICANN to be operationally ready to deploy DNSSEC at the root level and work with relevant stakeholders to determine how this should be implemented. With input from many stakeholders, ICANN has prepared a document describing this path to operational readiness for signing the root.

ICANN Opens Public Comment Period on Czech Arbitration Court Proposed Pilot Projects

22 July 2008 | ICANN has received a request from the Czech Arbitration Court (CAC) to run two pilot projects related to its implementation of UDRP.


Upcoming Events

2 - 7 November 2008: 33rd International Public ICANN Meeting - Cairo, Egypt


About ICANN

ICANN Bylaws

Our bylaws are very important to us. They capture our mission of security, stability and accessibility, and compel the organization to be open and transparent. Learn more at www.ICANN.org.

Strategic Plan, July 2007 - June 2010

Adopted FY09 Operating Plan and Budget [PDF, 489 KB]


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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."